Monday, March 18, 2013

In January we travelled to Bangkok, then Mr Martin went to
Seoul for a few days, then we both left for our annual trip home in early Feb.

I say annual trip home, but actually it was my first trip
home – since last year’s trip coincided with starting my new job, and I thought
it wasn’t exactly a fabulous idea to start work and then leave on holiday a
week later.

Going home was weird only in that it wasn’t. It was as if I
had just been away for a weekend, rather than for two whole years. Some things
had changed at home – but mostly it was just exactly the same as I had left it,
and in no time at all I was driving my mother in law around just like any other
weekend.

I took the opportunity of being at home to schedule some
medical appointments and ended up staying an extra week – so I was basically
absent from Vietnam for all of February.That means there is no Tet madness post here this year (phew!).

The big news in our house is that I finally bought a
countertop oven when I got back.It’s a
bit crap – but that’s ok – all the countertop ovens in this country are a bit
crap, I think.

Shopping for the oven was interesting.I visited lots of places (OK, 3 places) and
found only 3 different brands available:

They are all basically the same: glass door, rotisserie
thing, fan for “convection”, ticking dial that tells you it’s on.You can get big ones or smaller ones, and my
kitchen is small so I got a smaller one, and the cheapest one – though only
really because that was the one in the third shop we went to and I didn’t think
it was different enough from the others to go back to a different shop.

So long as you turn the heat up to blasting, it works OK,
and so I’ve been cooking stuff that can only be cooked in ovens for the past
week. I haven’t tried baking anything yet, but watch this space!

Oh look! A shepherd's pie... You can get purple potatoes here lately.

I’m working full time now, so I’m slowly coming to grips
with the reality of really only having weekends free to do stuff like watch
daytime tv and go shopping for cosmetics.Ms T, our housekeeping lady has been an absolute godsend – if only
because we now only need to fight about doing the dishes about twice a week –
and I haven’t ironed anything for ages, if you don’t count the tet money.

I’ve recently learned that Ms T has to pay for parking when
she comes to our place – which means that I finally have a use for my huge pile of 1,000 and 2,000 dong notes...